Ziheng Li
Author directoryOther people with similar names: Ziheng Li, Ziheng Li
2026
LiveClawBench: Toward Faithful Evaluation of Stateful LLM Assistants
Xiang Long | Li Du | Yilong Xu | RongJian Xu | Qiyanhui LU | Ying Gao | Qinhua Xie | Fangcheng Liu | Ning Ding | Haoqing Wang | Ziheng Li | Changjiang Zhou | Jianyuan Guo | Yehui Tang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Xiang Long | Li Du | Yilong Xu | RongJian Xu | Qiyanhui LU | Ying Gao | Qinhua Xie | Fangcheng Liu | Ning Ding | Haoqing Wang | Ziheng Li | Changjiang Zhou | Jianyuan Guo | Yehui Tang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
OpenClaw-style personal assistants extend LLM agents from isolated tool use to open-ended, stateful, and personalized software environments. Evaluating these assistants is fundamentally a fidelity problem: benchmarks must be faithful both to the distribution of real assistant tasks and to the execution semantics of the environments in which those tasks unfold. Existing benchmarks often lose fidelity in one dimension or the other. Their task distributions are shaped by what is easy to isolate, mock, and verify, underrepresenting real-world difficulties such as cross-service dependency, contaminated state, implicit intent, and runtime change. Their environments are either live but hard to reproduce, or reproducible but reduced to endpoint-level stubs that remove sessions, artifacts, state transitions, and downstream side effects. We introduce LiveClawBench, a benchmark designed around this dual-fidelity requirement. LiveClawBench combines a Triple-Axis Complexity Framework for difficulty-driven task construction with reproducible full-stack mock applications that preserve stateful execution semantics. With 134 executable cases across 10 domains with 22 mocked services, LiveClawBench supports controlled, extensible, and factor-level diagnostic evaluation of realistic agentic tasks.
Not All Preferences Deserve Gradients: Understanding Gradient Utility in Offline Reasoning Alignment
Hui Wu | Hengyi Cai | Jinman Zhao | Xinran Chen | Ziheng Li | Zhejun Zhao | Shuaiqiang Wang | Yuchen Li | Dawei Yin
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Hui Wu | Hengyi Cai | Jinman Zhao | Xinran Chen | Ziheng Li | Zhejun Zhao | Shuaiqiang Wang | Yuchen Li | Dawei Yin
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Offline preference optimization aligns reasoning models from fixed chosen-rejected pairs, yet standard methods apply gradient updates from every pair regardless of its training value under the current policy. We argue that this uniform treatment is wasteful and potentially harmful. From the perspective of gradient utility, we show that a pair’s contribution depends jointly on informativeness and stability. Pair utility drifts as the policy evolves, high-gradient samples can coincide with high-curvature regions, leading to noisy and destabilizing updates, and the most effective supervision comes from stable confident errors where the model is reliably wrong yet curvature remains low. These findings motivate **SAGE** (Stability-Aware Gradient Efficiency), which maintains difficulty-stratified candidate pools refreshed during training and selects pairs within each pool by a forward-pass signal-to-curvature score. Only pairs with high current utility receive gradient computation; the rest are excluded from backpropagation. On mathematical reasoning benchmarks across multiple model scales, SAGE outperforms full-data and size-matched baselines while producing substantially smoother optimization trajectories.